Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  Liberal and Conservative politicians started to take the UP (and the FARC) much more seriously. The generals grew increasingly suspicious of where peace talks might lead. On being told that ‘every day someone from the UP is being killed by paramilitaries,’ the Minister of Defence was reported to have said that ‘at that rate they’ll never get the job done’.*

  In October 1987 paramilitaries assassinated the UP leader, Jaime Pardo Leal. The brave man who stepped into his shoes was Bernardo Jaramillo. He got the government to offer better protection for his party’s members – which was grimly ironic, since the UP’s bodyguards received their training from the DAS intelligence service and their weapons from the Army, in spite of both agencies’ involvement in the murders of UP members.

  The government seemed torn between democratic good order, an Army-led counter-insurgency strategy and the paramilitaries’ dirty war against the left. When the FARC ambushed and killed a further twenty-seven soldiers, Barco’s interior minister said, ‘If the FARC do not disarm and dissolve, the only option left for the government is to wipe them out militarily, no matter how much that might cost.’ Anticipating a renewed assault from the paramilitaries, the UP asserted that it was independent of the FARC, but to no avail. Braulio Herrera and Iván Márquez – the UP’s only representatives in Congress – gave up their seats and returned to the mountains to rejoin the FARC.

  Bernardo Jaramillo stayed at the helm of his party, steering it towards what generations of unarmed leftists in Colombia have come to call ‘the deadly middle’. The UP president was growing increasingly tired of the FARC’s strategy of kidnapping, extortion and executions, to say nothing of the never-ending, unwinnable war they were bent on fighting. Not long after making a pro-FARC speech at Jaime Pardo Leal’s graveside, Jaramillo laid into the guerrillas in a speech to party activists.

  The FARC’s political leader, Jacobo Arenas, didn’t like the line Jaramillo was pursuing. The UP’s commitment to parliamentary democracy might have offered Colombians the surest route to peace, but it undermined the FARC’s raison d’être. Bitter and jealous, in 1989 Jacobo Arenas chastised the former UP congressman Braulio Herrera before sending him off to do the impossible: retake the Magdalena Medio from the paramilitaries. Once there, Herrera’s paranoic pendulum turned on his own soldiers. He had 100 of them killed before he was forced to flee the country.

  Bernardo Jaramillo’s move towards the centre ground did nothing to reassure the UP’s enemies on the right either. The Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) – the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia – was an umbrella group covering all of the paramilitary armies that sprang up across Colombia in the course of the nineties. From the point of view of its commander-in-chief, Carlos Castaño, the UP was still a tool of the FARC. ‘Anything that came from the left, and anything that was communist, was for us the same thing, including the trade unions.’ Bernardo Jaramillo seemed to know that this spelt his end. He wrote in his diary, ‘When the things that we fight for and believe in dissolve into the reality of our world, men seem to find, almost happily, death.’

  In later years Castaño would call destruction of the UP the AUC’S ‘biggest mistake … If we had had the slightest education that taught us at least what the democratic left was, what the radical left was … We wouldn’t have made so many mistakes.’* This failure to distinguish between a legal political party and an illegal terrorist organization was at the heart of the conflict. The UP was the one organization that might have tempted the FARC’s guerrillas out of the mountains and into Congress. Its decimation by AUC paramilitaries could only lead to the entrenchment of the FARC’s hardliners.

  Carlos Castaño’s turn to paramilitarism had begun in 1987, when the FARC kidnapped his father Jesús Castaño in the gold-mining town of Segovia, Antioquia. The Castaño brothers paid their father’s ransom twice, but when his kidnappers demanded a third payment, they refused. In response, the guerrillas killed their father. Fidel, Carlos and Vicente set out to avenge his death. They led an attack on the people of Segovia, burying them alive, hanging them from meat hooks and mutilating their bodies with chainsaws. By the time the Castaño brothers left the town, they had killed forty-three people.

  ‘The Germans have a word for what the Castaños did – schrecklichkeit, or frightfulness,’ Robin Kirk writes in More Terrible Than Death, her account of the rise of the AUC. ‘It was applied in their invasion of Belgium and France, to circumvent the civilian resistance. It was not homicidal mania, but deliberate, part of the plan.’* Looking back on the early days of the AUC, Fidel Castaño offered a more circumspect account. ‘At that time, the border between justice and vengeance was very difficult to decipher, very vague … We killed a lot of civilians.’†

  During the late nineties, paramilitary alliances of landowners, Army generals, local politicians and cocaine traffickers seized control of the most important regions in the north of the country. They wiped out the union representing workers in the banana plantations of Urabá, replacing it with a stooge union of their own. On the border with Panama, they pushed the FARC into the deepest jungles and began running cocaine through hidden bays on the Caribbean coast. In the Montes de María, a region near Cartagena that has long been dominated by huge estates, they forced entire communities to flee. With smallholders out of the way, they planted the deserted fields with huge plantations of West African oil palm, which still supply much of the biofuel that the United States is so keen to encourage.

  For years, urban Colombians chose to turn a blind eye to paramilitarism. For many of them, the Castaño brothers’ campaign of terror was justified, even noble, and Fidel Castaño was able to move freely in the circles of high society. Scarcely an eyebrow was raised when he bought up dozens of Fernando Botero’s paintings, had his photograph taken with Salvador Dalí and bought an apartment in Paris. As Steven Dudley noted, ‘one could imagine him splitting someone’s head open with a machete one night and drinking a nice Chianti the next.’‡

  Rather like the National Socialists in Germany, the AUC’s relationship with the elite was ambiguous. Some paramilitaries were essentially traditionalists, who claimed only to be doing what the government could not. Others called themselves ‘right-wing guerrillas’, and argued that their ‘self-defence groups’ should be recognized as the third actor in the conflict. The Army’s attitude to the AUC was similarly opaque, perhaps best summed up by a retired colonel, who said that the relationship between the armed forces and the paramilitaries was akin to that between a married man and his mistress. ‘You can’t take her home, but you have to have her.’*

  By 1990 Colombia was polarized between competing illegal groups – guerrillas, paramilitaries and the cocaine cartels – united only by their faith in violence and their increasing willingness to target the unarmed. The last days of Virgilio Barco’s government were especially violent. Gunmen assassinated several presidential candidates, including Carlos Pizarro of the M-19 (which had just turned in their arms) and Bernardo Jaramillo, the doomed leader of the UP. The paramilitaries even killed Luis Carlos Galán, a Liberal Party politician who had looked certain to win the presidency. Among his election promises had been a commitment to crack down on the cocaine cartels.

  6. Downriver to Mompós

  To find out what happened next – what might be called the end of the beginning of the Colombian saga – I’d arranged to travel to the delta town of Mompós to meet two former FARC guerrillas: James and Nicolás. From San Gil I travelled back to Bucaramanga and then west, down from the easternmost range of the Andes and onto the floodplain of the Magdalena. From Barrancabermeja I could catch a boat that would take me downriver through the Magdalena Medio to Mompós.

  I made it to the wharf with an hour to spare before the boat was due to leave. A doughty-looking woman was selling empanadas from a table set up under a beach umbrella. As I stood there munching, she gestured at the skinny kid who had been begging me for change a moment before, and now stood with his back to us looking ou
t over the river. He was one of the desechables –the disposables– she said; a good-for-nothing and a thief. Be that as it may, when he drifted back to her stall, she handed him an empanada and a glass of guava juice without a word, as if putting her thoughts into words had troubled her conscience.

  The radio news reported that in some of the coastal cities 500 times more rain had fallen than was normal. The whole country seemed to be under water. November was usually a dry month, but in Bogotá, the average rainfall for the month had fallen in a single day. As the rain saturated the land, hillsides collapsed, bridges and roads were swept away by mudslides, and crops rotted before they had a chance to ripen. The weatherman blamed La Niña, a seasonal cooling of the Pacific. This year, the ocean had cooled a degree lower than usual. La Niña was ‘maturing’, he warned, building towards its ‘maximum expression’. He spoke of the rain going on until May; that was seven months away.

  Looking out over the river, I wondered if the Magdalena was as wide here as the Thames was at Waterloo. It was hard to compare such different rivers, but it looked about right, though the Magdalena was full and the milky brown water looked deeper and faster than the Thames.

  The boat we boarded at Barrancabermeja was surely too small for such a big river; it looked like something you’d find on the Serpentine in Hyde Park. It was made of fibreglass, with wooden benches for about fifteen people and a low roof that sagged under the weight of the sacks of rice, flour and plantain that the porters had strapped to it. The captain and his assistant wore pressed white shirts with strips of black felt on the shoulders to approximate naval epaulets. Once we were all aboard, the captain’s assistant cranked up the outboard motor. The boat raised its prow out of the water and tipped us backwards into our seats, and this was how we travelled for the next seven hours.

  Not long into the journey, we hit one of the many trees that were floating downriver with the floodwater, a collision that sent the boat careening off towards the riverbank. The captain eased off the throttle and the vessel glided to a halt just short of the reeds. The passengers looked at one another, wondering how close we had come to disaster. ‘Such things often happen,’ the captain said nonchalantly, and off we went again.

  Apart from the occasional fisherman’s cabin, there were few settlements on the banks of the Magdalena. From the river to the distant mauve hills in the east and west, the floodplain was covered with dense, emerald-green woods. Every few miles we passed a solitary white heron looking out over the river. Once, I saw a pelican fly overhead. As we travelled further downstream, the temperature began to climb and the costeño accents got thicker.* The passengers got darker as black, indigenous and multifarious zambo mixes of the two took the seats that had been occupied by the paler people upriver. The old woman in front of me felt compelled to talk, about what I couldn’t tell. I did as the locals did: gave her a nod of acknowledgement and proceeded to ignore her.

  Every hour or so, we’d pull up at a riverside wharf. As the roar of the outboard motor died down and the captain eased his boat to shore, I could hear music from the mobile phone that the woman behind me had pressed to her ear, as if it were wrong to be in company without music, or even a tinny facsimile of music. ‘Puerto Wilches,’ the captain announced. I recognized many of the names he called out that day as sites of paramilitary massacres or guerrilla attacks on Army patrols.

  Until recently, few outsiders dared venture into the Magdalena Medio. Although apparently peaceful, its river towns still carried an air of menace. When I had told him that I was planning to go to Barrancabermeja, Carlos had warned me to be careful who I spoke to and what I said. It was hot, in both senses of the word, as I knew all too well. I’d been there before, when I accompanied a delegation of British trade unionists back in 2005. I remembered a teenager, not long out of high school, who was working for one of the women’s groups in the town. I’d promised to send her a souvenir from England, but time and distance had helped me give my conscience the slip. Now that I was back in her hometown, I felt a twinge of guilt.

  I still have a copy of a letter that she showed to me before I left the town. It was from the local paramilitaries, who called themselves the United Social Cleansing Squad.

  All these so-called displaced people’s organizations, human rights defenders, trade unions, NGOs and a whole political party of sons of bitches who think they’re untouchable are guerrillas. We will wipe out anyone opposed to the development and security of this country. We will not allow you to carry on spreading your stupid little ideas that belong in the past. Fucking bastards, you’re going to regret the day you were born. We will destroy you. Traitors to the fatherland – get out or die. Peace in Colombia – and in your graves, you fucking grasses.

  We reached the town of El Banco just before four o’clock. I’d been told to expect more harassment there than just about anywhere in Colombia, but with the heat, the warnings seemed to have evaporated from my head. When I disembarked, my only thought was for a cigarette and the need to stretch my numb behind. I was quickly surrounded by ten men, all offering to take me to Mompós by motorbike.

  ‘There is no bus to Mompós and there’s no boat either,’ one of them said. ‘The rain, you see,’ said another, gesturing at the bruised clouds overhead. After seven hours of passive observation, suddenly all eyes were on me, demanding a response I didn’t have the means or inclination to give. I scowled and sighed and told them to come back after I’d had a smoke. ‘No problem,’ they agreed, nodding among themselves – and then came back a second later with the same demanding looks.

  A few young Army conscripts were milling around the wharf, most armed with rifles. One had a grenade-launcher slung over his shoulder. He looked as dazed as I felt, so I asked him if there was a bus to Mompós, in the hope that he wouldn’t have the wherewithal to lie. But like the others, he said that the only way out was by motorbike. So I relented; one of the bikers took my rucksack from my back and strapped it to the pillion of his bike. With my precious camera and laptop perched on the petrol tank, I stopped worrying and got on the back.

  Off we went, too fast for my liking, under the jacaranda trees that shrouded the wharf and onto the elevated road that cut through the sluggish marshes. For the first few miles, the road was paved. Then we spent a mile or two on gravel before the pavement started again. Stranded cattle stood in the road, looking out over the flooded pastures on either side. A straggling band of mules and donkeys cantered past in the opposite direction. We passed families that had moved from their flooded homes up onto the road, where they had built lean-tos between the trees and rigged up power from the overhead line. They sat watching TV in the twilight; their skinny dogs sprawled in the road, barely looking up as we raced past.

  Half an hour later, my driver was forced to stop by the flood water from the fields to our right, which had washed the road into the fields further inland. It looked to be impassable, but then we heard somebody whistle from the shade cast by an oak tree and saw that some of the locals had dugout canoes ready for us. While one of them wheeled the bike aboard the chalupa, their children came out to show me the baby parrots they had balanced on their fingers.

  Once aboard, we were punted in silence through submerged gateways, where we had to duck into the boat to avoid the strands of barbed wire, into drowned fields where nothing stirred. We came to an abandoned village, where a stranded kitten on a doorstep meowed as we drifted past. A man stood stock-still in the water, watching us float by with a demented look in his eye. We were travelling at the same speed as the smoke that rose from the cigarette he held in his crippled fingers.

  Only after half an hour of hallucinatory drifting did we hit higher ground. My driver pushed his bike down a hastily laid gangplank, I climbed on the back and we sped on. Three times, the land disappeared under the water and we had to cast our eyes around for the boatmen in the shade. By the time we boarded our last chalupa, the sky was growing dark, making silhouettes of the trees and reflecting shades of dark blue in the
still, chrome water. The frogs started croaking. The boatmen’s voices grew lower and then died away.

  In the days when Colombia was a colony of Spain, boatmen used to row foreign goods upriver from Cartagena to Mompós, and then on to Honda, where they would be loaded onto mules for the long climb through the mountains to Bogotá. As they rowed upriver, they would sing: ‘Que triste está la noche; la noche que triste está; no veo en el cielo una estrella; rema y rema y rema – How sad is the night; the night, how sad it is; I see no star in the sky; row and row and row.’

  The boatmen would probably have blamed the flooding on El Mohán, the mythical guardian of the Magdalena who upended chalupas and dragged fishermen to the bottom of the river whenever he saw small fish in their nets. On stormy nights, he could be heard laughing at the destruction he wrought. The only way to placate him was by making him an offering of salt and tobacco. It was a colourful myth, but until well into the twentieth century El Mohán was quite real to many fishermen. They would see him in the marketplaces – a short, muscular man who came into town to buy tobacco and aguardiente and chat up the local women.

  We made it to Mompós an hour after the last of the light had left the sky. The Army had mounted a checkpoint on the approach into town. Under a solitary street light clouded by thick swarms of mosquitoes, a conscript asked me for a cigarette. ‘And one for my friend too?’ he asked, gesturing at a wordless soldier in the hot gloom.

  My driver told me that the Casa Amarilla was under water, but I asked that we go there anyway. The owner was an English journalist and I’d been looking forward to meeting him. His guesthouse was at the far end of a small muddy square, down one side of which ran what would have been a narrow riverfront park, had it not been swallowed up by the swollen Magdalena. Sandbags protected the high front door from the floodwaters. The housekeeper ushered me into a beautiful colonial house, with floors of thick terracotta tiles, rooms the size of hay barns and high ceilings of dried and blackened sugar cane. Carmen told me that the owner was in Bogotá, so I dropped off my things and went out to look for something to eat. At the first restaurant I came to, I found the waiter asleep at an outside table. He raised his head only to say that it was too late for dinner.